An extra £220 million is urgently needed to tackle the food crisis across east
Africa, the UN World Food Programme has said.

Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN World Food Programme, said at an emergency UN summit in Rome that the refugee routes into Kenya risked becoming "roads of death".

"We want to make sure the supplies are there along the road because some of them are becoming roads of death where mothers are having to abandon their children who are too weak to make it or who have died along the way," she said.

The new data came as senior officials from the G20 nations met in Rome, where Bruno le Maire, France's agriculture minister, said the famine was set to become "the scandal of the century" if action was not taken.

Almost 800,000 children in Somalia are now "acutely malnourished" and in need of special feeding – an increase of 40 per cent. 82 per cent of them are in the country's south, which is largely cut off from aid deliveries.

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The number of people needing help has increased by one million since January, and is 85 per cent higher than at the same time last year, Unicef said.

Afshan Khan, a Unicef director, told the Rome conference that the response to the current crisis must be "flexible".

"We must apply a range of modalities in different circumstances and adapting our response to local conditions and needs," he said.

Unicef is one of the few agencies so far able to bring supplies into Islamist-held areas of southern Somalia, and Mr Khan's statement was seen as an indication that arrangements were on the table to increase such deliveries.

No new aid pledges came from the meeting, held by the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation. But politicians welcomed an announcement of £310m in fresh World Bank funds to help fight the current drought and prepare those already affected to cope with future dry spells.

"The recurring nature of drought and growing risk it poses to social and economic gains in this region calls not only for immediate relief from the current situation, but also for building long term drought resilience," said Obiageli Ezekwesili, the World Bank's vice president for Africa.

Promises of help to safeguard the future were welcome but too late, said Barbara Stocking, the head of Oxfam.

"This meeting was a first step," she said. "But the fact that we are here again, three years after the world said never again to famine, shows that strong action is required as well as strong words.

"Often it feels as if the donor community is prepared to be very generous when it comes to this crisis but is simply not prepared to commit to the longer term."

Another meeting will be held in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, on Wednesday, when fresh promises are expected to fund programmes to save up to 11.5 million people in the Horn of Africa.

Among the worst affected are seeking help in Mogadishu, Somalia's wrecked capital, where the internationally-backed administration is struggling with an influx of more than 1,000 people a day.

They are camping between bombed-out buildings in the city, in the few areas controlled by the government.

But there are concerns that an expected military push against al-Shabaab, the pro-al-Qaeda Islamists ruling the rest of the city, could trigger a second crisis.

Sources confirmed a fresh offensive next month that is aimed at wrenching back control of the city from the insurgency.

"That is definitely complicated by the internally displaced people now flooding into the city," said one adviser to the Somali government.

Batulo Abukar 29, told The Daily Telegraph in Mogadishu that three of her children died as she fled Bakool, one of the two Somali famine zones, for Mogadishu.

She was also pregnant and lost that baby on her walk to safety.

"It is very painful, I am laying here now, I delivered a dead baby and all the other three died on the road," Mrs Abukar said.

"We left about six elderly people under tree waiting their death because they couldn't walk and no one would help them."